Not everything belongs in the shop window
Your ticket shop is your shop window: whoever passes by sees what you sell. That is the point, until you sell something that is not for everyone.
The staff party of a care organisation. Forty tickets a main sponsor hands out to business relations. A coach company booking three coaches at once at the group rate. A presale for your donors, a week before everyone else.
You do want that sale online. You want a list, a payment, a QR code at the door. You just do not want every visitor of your shop to see the group rate, or to wonder why they are not invited to the staff party.
Until now the workaround was a draft page, a separate account, or a form and a bank account number after all. That is no longer needed.
The screenshots below show the Dutch interface; the English one works the same way.
One field on the event form
On the edit page of your event you will find the field Access code. Enter a code of at least four characters and the event is restricted from that moment. Leave it empty and it is an ordinary public event.
You make up the code yourself. Upper or lower case does not matter when entering it, so TEAM2027 and team2027 both work.
What happens next
With a code on the event, several things change at once:
- The event is no longer on your home page and not in an event group.
- It is not in your sitemap, and the page asks search engines not to include it.
- It does not appear in the list of events your gift card is valid for.
- The widget on your own website does not show it.
So the event can only be reached through its own address. And whoever arrives there without the code sees this:
The name of the event and an input field. No description, no location, no prices, no ticket types.
You share the link and the code yourself
MijnEvent does not send the code for you. You share the address of the event page and the code in whatever way suits the group: in the invitation, in the staff newsletter, through your contact at the travel company. That way you know exactly who has it.
The guest enters the code, sees the tickets and orders as with any other event. They get the same confirmation email, the same PDF and the same pass in their wallet. At the door you scan the ticket with the same app.
Hidden is not the same as restricted
Taking an event off the list is the easy part. What matters is what happens when someone has the address anyway: forwarded in a group chat, or simply guessed.
That is why the check is not only on the screen. Without a valid code the server returns no ticket types, no seat map and no availability, and refuses an order. Someone who knows the address but not the code gets no further than the input field.
After the right code the browser receives a proof of access that is valid for twelve hours and is kept in that tab only. The code itself does not travel along after that. And guessing does not pay off: after ten attempts within a minute you have to wait. The error message does not say whether the event exists or has a code either, only that it is not correct.
Changing or removing the code
Has the code ended up somewhere it should not be? Enter a new one. The old one stops working from that moment, also for anyone who still has the page open. Share the new code with the people who are allowed to have it.
Remove the code and the event is public again and back in your shop. That also makes it useful for a presale: a week for your members or donors only, then for everyone, on the same page with the same tickets.
What it is not
Two things to avoid confusion:
- It is not a discount. The access code decides who may see the event. A lower rate is something you arrange with the ticket price itself, or with a discount code at checkout.
- They are not personal codes. Everyone you invite uses the same code. If you want to keep track of who is coming, the order already does that: every buyer enters a name and email address.
Duplicating for next year
If you duplicate the event for a next edition, the code deliberately does not come along. The copy is a draft without a code. That prevents last year's code, which by now sits in dozens of mailboxes, from working next year as well.
There is more on the page Private ticket sales.
